Modern communication centers are becoming multimedia-capable and often service both analog and various forms of digital media interactions and transactions. In order to service a large public client base, state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment, software applications, and various dedicated servers are compiled and integrated with state-of-the-art software platforms. In addition to managing very high levels of communication events of various media types, internal management duties must be performed within the center itself. Such duties include tracking and managing historical data, client data, product data, service personnel data, and center configuration data. Moreover, many communication center hosts have multiple service sites that are connected through networks both analog and digital.
The inventors know of an object-oriented, communication center management system that is currently used within some centers. This system provides tools for client/agent interaction management, intelligent routing, historical database reporting, statistical compilation and reporting, communication event load balancing, and configuration management. Parts of the system are distributed, for example, to agent desktop terminals for contact management. Servers are provided to facilitate transactions in different media types such as chat, e-mail, and so on. Parts of the system are distributed to telephony switches to provide intelligent routing and client interaction capability both from within the system and in some cases into event-sponsoring networks. The system is automated in many respects and updates to configuration parameters of the system are made periodically to add new equipment, reconfigure agent desktop applications, re-assign personnel to various duties, configure local telephony switches for agent level routing, and other duties.
Due to an extraordinarily large number of distributed components and software applications, configuration parameters that must be tracked and managed are numerous. The above-described system provides management tools to communication-center administrators for managing and manipulating configuration parameters. For example, a configuration server and configuration manager application is provided and accessible to administrators. The tools use a configuration code library to identify, change and distribute configuration updates throughout the system.
A drawback to this system is that it is mostly internally administered using proprietary code and is platform-dependant. Communication-center administrators access the configuration server through an application program interface from a local area network that is typically Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) enabled. A vehicle that is based on extensible markup language (XML) is available and known to the inventor for transmitting communication-center configuration data from one cooperating communication center to another in the case of multi-site centers. The vehicle is limited however, in that manipulation of data cannot be performed on the fly, that is, in real time. Therefore, the system is not suitable for third-party integration of center configuration data with other third-party management facilities such as customer relations management (CRM) applications.
What is clearly needed in the art is a platform-independent, standard-based, and Internet-oriented system and method that enables configuration of call centers to be saved and, if desired, transferred from one call center to another regardless of platform utilization.